Preface to the Hypertextual
Decline
and Fall

Edward
Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
was originally published in six volumes--71 chapters--issued as follows:
1 volume in 1776, two more volumes in 1781, and three concluding volumes
in 1788. I propose to experiment with a hypertextual edition of it. This
experiment is hardly begun, and the chapters to which there are links below
are not necessarily equally far along in their hypertextual form.
(The chapters currently available are listed at the end of this document.
Each may be downloaded or printed separately.) Note that each paragraph
has a number, and that any paragraph may be reached by using its number
as a bookmark (these targets are not ordinarily visible). The columns,
presently to be found only in the list
of shoulder captions that corresponded in the eighteenth-century quartos
to the analytical table of contents for each chapter, link back to the
corresponding paragraph or subparagraph of the history.. This list can
be used as a rough outline or index of the work. N.B.
It must be downloaded with the chapters if these links are to be followed.
Its name is dfcaps3.htm.

Hypertext is peculiarly appropriate for Gibbon's work, if only because
he had grave conceptual difficulties with either of the available placements
of notes. His first volume was first published with the notes at
the end of the volume, but David Hume urged him to place them at the foot
of the page, and in the third edition of his history, he did so. Yet in
his autobiography he says that he is still not certain that he was right
to do so. Hypertext links to notes allow readers to choose when and whether
they should read the notes, and hypertextuality portrays the text and notes
as distinct but intricately interrelated bodies of discourse. Gibbon,
like the erudite, antiquarian authors of his day but unlike the philosophes,
regarded notes indicating sources as indispensable and notes commenting
on and sometimes challenging the text itself as an irresistible opportunity
for personal opinion and intercourse with the reader, as well as for development
of interesting sidelights that would interrupt the flow of story or argument
were they included in the main text.

In addition, Gibbon planned in the last years of his life to add a "seventh
volume" to his history that would have included not only changes and additions
to notes and text, but a number ofappendices, a bibliographic description
of his sources, maps, chronological tables, and the like. In other
words he wanted to contextualize the history both more broadly and more
specifically, but he did not wish to alter the fundamental boundaries ,
chronological and thematic, that he had previously established. The
strength of his (perhaps unconscious) commitment to the general structure
he had achieved is indicated, perhaps, by an odd fact. In the course of
the abortive attempt at this seventh volume, he makes his now modestly
famous remark that he should have "deduced" the decline from an earlier
date, without considering (apparently) that he could have added an extension
to his narrative--a prequel, in our jargon. Hypertext, I suggest, is a
form of publication he would have welcomed, since it permits one to have
anything both ways.

Of course it also forces one to share with the reader the freedom to
control access to the parts of the structure. That freedom for the reader
would presumably be unacceptable to a truly "neoclassical" artist, but
though Gibbon's history is carefully structured, that structure is not
like a classical or neoclassical building, with an inflexible plan, elaborate
and fundamental symmetry, and singularity of effect and prospect.
The foundational principle of the Decline and Fall, in contrast,
is internal cross-reference, in both details and broad outlines.
Such cross-references obviously lend themselves to hypertextual representation--indeed,
the technology of hypertext simply reveals links that were built in from
the beginning. Also, like all referential works that propose their
information and arguments as falsifiable, the text and the notes constantly
refer outside themselves to the works of other authors and to all kinds
of evidence. In Gibbon's case, especially, the text itself abounds
in unlabelled allusions, verbal echoes of the words of other writers that
invite the knowledgeable reader to have a different, more complex experience
from that available to the ignorant. The appropriate architectural
analogy, it has several times been suggested, is with Gothic cathedrals--but
we might also cite Gibbon's favorite style in public architecture, the
baroque.

Hypertext can put all readers in the place of the most learned reader,
and web documents, in particular, can allow the poster to invite and request
readers to contribute their own recognitions and information about other
documents whose relevance tthey have discovered. For this hypertextual
edition in progress, I urgently request such contributions from interested
readers, as well as comments about the project.. Mail may be sent to me
at craddoc@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu.

Links of the following kinds are or will be available
for the posted chapters: Gibbon's footnotes--superscript numerals1.
Links to varying readings in different eighteenth-century
editions are signalled by highlighted text.
I follow the first edition for "accidentals"--the features of the text
that might have changed only by accident or by intervention of someone
at the printing house, and the third edition for all "substantive" differences
(the second edition was the only one we know Gibbon revised personally,
but many of the changes in the third edition, which was the first to have
the notes at the foot of pages and which therefore had room for more extended
changes than the second, could only have come from the author). However,
Gibbon wrote some changes and comments into two different copies of the
history that were in his personal library. If these changes were
alterations of the text, they have been incorporated into the text of this
version, and both the first and the third edition versions are linked to
the text here. If the changes were new notes, they are inserted in
their proper sequence with an asterisk to distinguish them from the preceding
note.

Occasionally the new material seems to be an authorial comment, with
no obvious place in the text or notes. Such comments are signalled by a
Gothic or by the letter {M}

Shoulder captions that were provided in the eighteenth-century quartos
are signalled with the following image
or {SC} if the reader is not using images.

If the caption is a date, however, the relevant signal is
or {D}.

Other kinds of links:

Notes by the present editor:
or {E}
Notes by previous editors
or {V}. These may include but are not limited to the following:

To return from any link to the main text, please use your "back" button.
Please note that these chapters are in different stages of editing, and
probably none is entirely free from typographical errors. Since handset
type cannot be scanned, all have been keyboarded (by me) from photocopies
of the eighteenth-century quartos. Chapters I and XV are at present (May
20, 1998) the most fully edited.

The whole Decline and Fall is already available on the Internet,
thanks to the work of David Reed, who originally posted a version scanned
and corrected from H. H. Milman's nineteenth-century edition and who has
continued to work on and improve his versions, with the most recent, including
italics, bold, and foreign characters, posted at Project Gutenberg and
an earlier version, converted to HTML by another hand, available through
the back door--list of additional books--of the Wheaton College Christian
Classics Etherial Library. Why then this edition? Milman was one of
the best of the nineteenth-century clerical editors, and the inclusion
of Milman's notes might have any number of valuable results, including
that experienced by the youthful Winston Churchill when he first encountered
Gibbon: "I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to
end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the
pages, and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against
the disparagements of his pompous-pious editor." (My Early Life: A Roving
Commission, 1930). These HTML versions admirably achieve the admirable
version of providing a free, downloadable version of Gibbon's history exactly
similar to a print copy, and every admirer of Gibbon must be grateful to
Reed for his pioneering and continuing efforts. I particularly recommend
them to teachers, who need not be limited to chapters XV, the one most
often anthologized, when teaching Gibbon in courses in eighteenth-century
literature or history.

But a critical text, as described above, must be based on the eighteenth-century
editions controlled by the author, not on nineteenth-century editions,
and an HTML version of a printed text is hardly the equivalent of the truly
hypertextual Decline and Fall to which at present I can only aspire..
.

The "Edward Gibbon" link in the first sentence leads to a brief biography
and selected list of commentary on Gibbon and his work, including my own
Edward
Gibbon: A Reference Guide, which lists most of the print sources published
prior to 1985. I am also working on a Supplement
to
that guide, which is presently at a very early stage.